Category: Temperance

• The Spontaneous Combustion Scare

  This theory held that certain people—especially heavy drinkers—could ignite from within and burn to death without an external flame. In the nineteenth century the idea became especially associated with alcohol, moral weakness, and bodily corruption, making it a powerful cautionary image in a culture increasingly shaped by temperance reform. The historical record shows that spontaneous human combustion was treated for long periods as a serious medical possibility, that alcoholism was frequently linked to alleged cases, and that the fear entered mainstream literary culture through works like Dickens’s Bleak House. What remains less certain is the degree to which the scare was systematically promoted by the Temperance Movement itself rather than simply borrowed by it as a ready-made moral warning.